Three routes, in increasing order of separation:

Call your mobile carrier and add a second line to your existing phone. You get a real Canadian mobile number on the network you already use. Outbound calls and texts work the way they do on your personal number, because it is the same network. This is the least clever option and the one that fails least often.

Sign up for a virtual number service. An app or web service that gives you a number over the internet. More features — greetings, hours, transcription, shared inboxes — and a shorter setup. Also where every reliability complaint in this category lives.

Buy a cheap second handset and put a prepaid plan on it. Complete separation. A second device to carry and charge.

You do not need to register a business, incorporate, or have a business bank account to get a number by any of these routes. You may need one of those things to send text messages through some providers, which is the first of the two Canadian complications below.

What's different about doing this in Canada?

Two things, and both of them bite people who followed guidance written for Americans.

Texting may require a registry number. Several providers require a business identifier before they will let you send SMS. One Canadian reviewer of a US-built service reported being told they needed "a Provincial or Federal Corporation/Registry ID Number" to send texts at all. If texting matters to you — and for a lot of practices it is the only way to reach some clients — ask the provider, in writing, whether a sole proprietor practising under their own name in Canada can send SMS on their service.

Outbound calling can be blocked at the carrier level. A Canadian reviewer described setting up a US business-phone app completely, then being told by its support team that their Canadian mobile carrier blocks the app's outgoing caller ID — their summary was that people could call in, but they could not call anyone back. Test outbound calling before you publish the number anywhere.

There is a third, smaller one: the free virtual number service that American guides recommend by name is not available to Canadians in the same form. If a setup guide's first step is "get a free number", it was not written for you.

What should I ask before I sign up?

Six questions. Any provider that can't answer them in plain language is telling you something.

• Can I make outbound calls and send texts from a Canadian mobile network, as a sole proprietor without a corporation number?

• Where is my data stored, and who has access to it?

• Can I take this number with me if I leave, and what is the process?

• What happens if I stop using the number for a while — can it be reclaimed?

• How do I reach a human when the line is broken?

• Is there a written agreement covering how you handle client information?

That last one matters more here than most places. A Canadian therapist looking for a second line put it bluntly about one popular free option — the privacy policy was unacceptable — and about another that the legal terms were written for a different country. You are allowed to make that a dealbreaker.

It is worth being clear about who the obligation lands on. Privacy law does not license phone providers; it binds you, and your College turns that into something you can put to a vendor.

Ontario's social work College tells registrants to "ensure that client information is stored in a jurisdiction where the privacy laws are consistent with Ontario laws or, where applicable, Canadian federal laws" (OCSWSSW, Interpretation 5.3.1). Nova Scotia's counselling therapy College is more specific again for remote work, requiring platforms "hosted on servers housing data exclusively within Canadian jurisdiction" (NSCCT, Interjurisdictional Telecounselling (Canada)). And Alberta's psychology regulator wants the arrangement written down: where client information sits in a system outside your own control, the standard asks for "a written information management agreement" and "a written information sharing agreement that addresses access, secondary use and disclosure of client information" (College of Alberta Psychologists, Standards of Practice).

Which is why the last two questions on that list are the ones to insist on. A provider that will not tell you where the data lives, or will not sign anything about how it handles it, has made your answer for you.

What does it cost?

Reported figures from practitioners discussing this publicly cluster in the low tens of dollars a month for a phone-only service, with a carrier second line sitting at the higher end and app-based numbers at the lower end. Bundles that include video, fax or secure messaging cost more.

Three published anchors, and one caveat that matters more than the numbers.

A carrier second line is a second plan. There is no discounted second-number product in Canada. Bell states the mechanism plainly: dual SIM gives you two numbers on one phone, but "you will need two rate plans and will be billed separately for the two lines" (Bell, dual SIM support). The cheapest publicly priced Canadian line is prepaid — "$19/month" with unlimited Canada-wide calling (Koodo prepaid plans). Several carriers publish add-a-line rates only behind a login, so the figure you end up paying may not be one you can check in advance.

Virtual services start in the teens per month. Grasshopper publishes "plans start as low as $14/month"; Talkroute's entry plan is "$19/month" for one user and one number; Quo, which was OpenPhone until recently, lists a Starter tier at "$19 Per user/per month". None of those pages states a currency, and all three are US-domiciled — so the Canadian cost is higher than the number printed, and the per-user ones climb if anyone else ever answers your line.

Google Voice is not an option here. Its own help pages state that the single-user plans are "only available in the US" (Google Voice subscription types). If a setup guide's first step is "get a free Google Voice number", it was not written for you.

Which one should I pick?

Pick the carrier second line if you want a work number and nothing else, you plan to answer and return calls yourself, and you would rather never think about this again. It is the cheapest thing that reliably works, and it is the option a lot of Canadian therapists quietly land on after trying something more clever.

Pick a virtual service if what you actually need is for something to happen when you can't answer — a greeting that states your hours, an automatic reply to a missed call, a transcript so you can triage between sessions, or a number an administrator can also see. That is a different product from a phone line and it is worth paying more for only if you will use it.

Pick a second handset if you need to be able to physically put work down, or if your work is the kind where a personal device being pulled into a legal process is a live concern.

After you have the number

Three things before you publish it.

Test it from someone else's phone. Call it, leave a voicemail, send it a text, and call back out from it. The single most common complaint about virtual numbers is that they fail quietly — the ring never arrives, the text never lands, and you find out at a no-show.

Record a greeting that says something true. When you return calls, what to do in an emergency, and which channel is fastest. A greeting that just says your name makes the caller guess.

Put it everywhere at once. Directory profile, website, email signature, invoices, consent form, voicemail on your old number if you had one out there. The usual failure after setting up a work number is not clients ignoring it — it is the practitioner still handing out the old one out of habit.

About Rivet

Rivet is a Canadian practice line built for therapists — a separate number for calls, texts and voicemail, with video sessions and clinical tools in the same place. Your data stays in Canada, and transcription runs on Rivet's own hardware rather than a third-party AI service.

One plan, $65 CAD a month, everything included. Fourteen-day trial, no card.

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